The development of electronic devices with printed circuit boards typically involves many steps, known as a design flow. This design flow typically starts with a specification for a new circuit to be implemented with a printed circuit board. The specification of the new circuit can be transformed into a circuit design, such as a netlist, for example, by a schematic capture tool or by synthesizing a logical circuit design, sometimes referred to as a register transfer level (RTL) description of the circuit. The netlist, commonly specified in an Electronic Digital Exchange Format (EDIF), can describe nets or connectivity between various devices or instances in the circuit design.
The design flow continues by verifying functionality of the circuit design, for example, by simulating or emulating the circuit design and verifying that the results of the simulation or emulation correspond with an expected output from the circuit design. The functionality also can be verified by statically checking the circuit design for various attributes that may be problematic during operation of an electronic device built utilizing the circuit design.
Once the circuit design has been functionally verified, the design flow continues to design layout and routing, which includes placing and interconnecting various components or parts into a layout representation of a printed circuit board. This procedure can be implemented in many different ways, but typically, through the use of a layout tool, which can present a graphical view of the printed circuit board and allow a designer to drag or place parts from a library onto the layout representation of the printed circuit board. The layout tool can validate the electronic device and perform various design rule checks on placed parts to ensure that the electronic device can be effectively built.
Since many electronic devices made on printed circuit boards will be included within a product, the layout of the printed circuit board may be constrained to ensure the product can be effectively manufactured. For example, the industrial or mechanical design of the product can define the structure of the printed circuit board, without components or parts, to be housed in the product. Since layout tools conventionally utilize planar layout representations of printed circuit boards in order to perform their placing and interconnecting various components or parts, when a configuration of a printed circuit board defined by the industrial or mechanical design is planar, many of these layout tools can convert the defined configuration of the printed circuit board into the planar layout representation.
As products get smaller, however, many industrial or mechanical designs implement non-planar printed circuit board configurations, such as a folded printed circuit board having flexible areas that allow the printed circuit board to be folded into a three-dimensional structure. In these situations, the industrial or mechanical designs can include a three-dimensional mechanical model of the folded printed circuit board to be housed in the product. Conventional layout tools, however, cannot interpret these three-dimensional mechanical models, leaving design teams the onerous task of having to manually build a layout representation of the three-dimensional mechanical model that can be utilized by the layout tools.